On-Line conversation with Amanda Tusa of Central Grocery

Yesterday, I posted this photo of Decatur Street on Virtually New Orleans. I regularly cross-post stuff from VNO to LiveJournal. In LiveJournal's New Orleans Community, I encountered Amanda Tusa from Central Grocery. Her comments, and my responses:

Amanda: FYI: Progress Grocery was, and had always been, a mere carbon-copy of our business nextdoor. Central Grocery was established in 1906, which was years before Progress existed, and now it has been bought out by some other Italian guy, who re-named it "Luigi's". They also claim to have "invented the muffuletta". pffffft

ok, fact: My great grandfather came here off the boat from Sicily, built Central Grocery in 1906, and invented the Muff. Now my Dad owns Central, and I work there off and on.
No confusion on this. I'm right. ;)

Me: Hmm, the spelling is as varied as the places that make the sandwich. shame your olive salad has so much cottonseed oil in it these days, though...

Amanda: A.) there is no cottonseed oil in our olive salad. we use virgin olive oil. where the fuck are you getting all this nonsense from?

B.) i don't care how many businesses botch the spelling. Muffuletta is the correct way. It gets it's name because the bread it is made with is called "muffuletta bread". So, if other ppl are spelling it any other way, they are just retarded.

Me: the cottonseed issue came up in 01 or 02 or so. We were re-doing the "top ten muff" list for my website, so we did a head-to-head with half a progress muff and half a central muff. The central muff was so greasy the oil ran through the paper--nasty sandwich. It tasted funny, and we confirmed, both on the jars of olive salad Central sells in stores and by the big pile of cottonseed oil cans outside the place, that the olive salad wasn't 100% olive oil. If y'all have changed that and gone back to making an edible olive salad, we'll have to come back and review the sandwich again. I haven't bothered with y'all since then because I hate eating nasty food.

Amanda: You obviously don't know what you're talking about. I could give a shit less if you never come back to our store again. We have more business than we can handle already.

Well, far be it from me to eat somewhere I'm not welcome...